07 Apr Tal Bachman on Steynonline: “We Have Met the Enemy”
We don’t know Tal Bachman; we only know he writes at Mark Steyn’s www.steynonline.com website. Which suggests that Bachman is a pretty astute guy…because Mark Steyn is an American hero who thinks, writes and ‘commentates’ at the highest level, and we’re sure he doesn’t allow mediocrities to write for his website.
In any case, Bachman’s recent posting “We Have Met the Enemy” includes some of the most insightful observations we’ve seen of America’s profound societal/cultural distress. Some excerpts:
The strange figures known as Wokists currently destroying America aren’t just reprises of earlier enemies. They represent something rather new. The political cult of Wokism combines the worst aspects of every political cult in history.
Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven’s Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you’ve got yourself a thing.
Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name (“social justice”) drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.
Although this is often denied to outsiders, Wokist theology requires hatred of America. It teaches that America was conceived in sin and remains insufferably sinful. It therefore decrees that America deserves execution and cremation into nothingness. Into that newly-created void, Wokism itself must move. Only then will righteousness prevail. Making this happen is a sacred obligation for all cult members. Their great success shows their sincerity.
It’s worth mentioning that while Wokists want to destroy the United States of America, they don’t mind the name. For now anyway, they want to keep it. Retention of the name “The United States of America” works as a kind of soporific: it helps obscure what they’re actually doing.
And what they’re actually doing is something like an Invasive Parasite Play: While keeping the outer forms (like the country’s name, like “elections”, etc.) intact, they move in to co-opt and control the structures and institutions which really run the country (which is to say, the structures and institutions which control us). As a result, millions remain oblivious that Wokists are destroying and replacing everything that ever constituted the country—that is, that they are changing what ‘The United States of America’ actually is.
Among many other things, that means first targeting public order, buildings, cities, fair trials, public trust, careers, police forces, education, laws, educations, freedom of speech and religion and assembly and press, codes of ethics, corporate practices, borders, political boundaries, the military, the economy, demography, religious beliefs, customs, music, books, myths, movies, family dynamics, sexuality, heroes, villains, history, aspirations, everything, and then, wherever possible, either destroying them or replacing them with Wokist substitutes.
I mentioned above the analogy of an invasive parasite, but this play is really something even more ambitious. It’s a metamorphosis play, where infiltration, destruction, and replacement is followed by transforming the United States into some completely different entity altogether. That different entity is on track to resemble the former East Germany—a totalitarian puppet-state run by a lawless secret police, subservient to a greater foreign power—far more than any iteration of America throughout its history.
How did we get here? How have so many people—especially Millennials—fallen for a cheap, Marx-inspired, totalitarian deception?
In the case of the Millennials in particular, many have grown up, thanks to their groovy, “post-religion”, “non-judgmental” Baby Boomer or Nirvana-nihilist Gen X parents, without any awareness of traditional moral thought and practice (whether Christian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or anything else).
That is, they grew up spiritually deracinated, spiritually vulnerable, and spiritually needy—so of course they’d be attracted to Wokism. They’re human. They still possess all the spiritual intuitions and yearnings and desires and needs their ancestors possessed. They still yearn for belonging and tribal membership and sacrifice, righteousness and ritual and commandment, meaning and guidance and purpose in life. They still crave identity. They still crave some transcendent framework to help give them a sense of why they exist, what they should do, why it matters, and what it means to be a good person. They still want to know, what is the point of it all?
When you’re starving, miles from anywhere, and you find an old bag of potato chips by the side of the road, that’s what you eat. You don’t read the ingredients list and you don’t wonder if there are better alternatives out there. You have an urgent need for food, so you eat.
And that is where “meeting the enemy” brings us back to ourselves: All the institutions and practices which once met the needs I just described, and in largely salutary fashion, have been degenerating for decades. And they degenerated either at our hands, or in the face of our complacence.
There’s more, but you get the drift…this is a writer who can get below the surface of day to day media noise and help diagnose the underlying struggle. Let’s hope he can come up with remedies…